David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden

David Brooks, in a column on what he takes to be the inner life of Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. leaker, has a long list of those he believes Snowden has betrayed. Among them are “his employers,” Booz Allen and the C.I.A., who “took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.” He also “betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.”

This is an odd perspective. The founders did create the Constitution so that a solitary voice could be heard, whatever strictures of power surround it. More than that, they would not want a twenty-nine-year-old to feel so overcome with gratitude for his social betters—so humbled that they had noticed him—that he would be silent. The “honor code” that Brooks claims was violated is perhaps nothing more than condescension mitigated by social obligation. People with graduate degrees thought that giving someone not in their circle a chance was proof of their decency; by getting his hands dirty, Snowden not only broke whatever non-disclosure agreements he was asked to sign but intruded on their sense of their own goodness. By David Brooks’s logic, the next time they put aside the résumé of someone who attended a community college, it’s really Edward Snowden’s fault.

But it’s not only future non-traditional job-seekers for whom Snowden is making it hard:

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

Would those older methods include a warrant? The idea that we should not get worked up about programs like the one revealed by Snowden’s leaks, in which call records were collected, because we might make the government mad and cause it to spy more, is not what the founders had in mind, either.

Snowden strikes Brooks as the “ultimate unmediated man,” “suspicious,” not fully beyond the “fuzzy land” of childhood or properly “embedded” in “gently gradated authoritative structures.” And yet he concedes that Snowden is “right that the procedures he’s unveiled could lend themselves to abuse in the future.” Here, again, is Brooks’s imperative to rely on niceness: someday, someone might abuse these procedures, but we’re fine now. He’s wrong about the present, but the future risk ought to be bad enough: that such a structure is in place, that archives are filled with what we have a right to keep private, is abusive in itself.

“Sometimes leakers have to leak,” Brooks writes, but he is not persuaded that Snowden had to, even if he “faced a moral dilemma.” Maybe something there was worth mentioning—perhaps with a tap on the shoulder of a mentor with whom he had built a record of deference. But Snowden did it all wrong; having read a few of his comments on the press, Brooks decides that the young man “was obsessed with the danger of data mining but completely oblivious to his betrayals and toward the damage he has done to social arrangements and the invisible bonds that hold them together.”

Has Snowden damaged “social arrangements”? Perhaps private ones; with his girlfriend, for example. But if Brooks means the sort of arrangements that keep members of Congress, who are supposed to be exercising oversight, from pushing back after secret briefings, or that lead the President to tell us that the acquiescence of all three branches—even when one is represented by a secret, rubber-stamping court—should ease all doubts about a policy, then perhaps some damage is useful. The same logic applies when we talk about the arrangements between government agencies and private companies like Booz Allen—led by a former intelligence official—that have helped bloat our national-security system with secrets. Brooks, as I’ve written before, seems to have a greater horror of impoliteness than of injustice.

That comes across in another item on his list of Snowden’s offenses: “He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.” Or maybe they will realize that they can’t lie with impunity; maybe the next time James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, is asked a direct question in a Senate hearing, he will wonder, before offering a blatant falsehood in response, if he might get caught.

Clapper said “no” when Senator Ron Wyden asked him whether the N.S.A. was collecting data of any kind from Americans. (“Not wittingly,” he added, as though one could unwittingly seek a secret court order.) When Andrea Mitchell, of NBC, asked him about his response after the leaks, Clapper said that he’d thought it was a “ ‘When are you going to start—stop beating your wife’ kind of question”—that is, somehow cheap. Actually, if you are beating your wife, it is a perfectly fair question. Clapper conceded that his answer might have been “too cute by half,” relying on a separate “semantic” understanding of certain words: “when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.” (“Collection” is not what you’d think of as a terribly technical term.)

The failure of the Senate hearings, despite Wyden’s best efforts, brings us back to the issue of what, exactly, Snowden was supposed to do. Brooks says he “self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability,” and wonders if what he knew was really “so grave” as to be worth contributing to “the corrosive spread of cynicism.” Snowden, he said, “is making everything worse.” His choices only make sense, according to Brooks, “if you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society.”

The press is not among the elements of civil society that Brooks lists; and yet it is the one to which Snowden turned. He did not drop his documents from a helicopter, and neither did the reporters, who are often there when what Brooks might regard as less crass safeguards fail. Whistle-blowing and investigative reporting can be loud, and grating, and necessary.

Reading Brooks’s laments about Snowden and “the fraying of the social fabric,” I found myself thinking about Norman Rockwell, if not in the same way Brooks might. (In 2008, after what he saw as a rhetorical triumph by Sarah Palin, Brooks wrote, “Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.”) The image that came to mind was one of the panels from Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series: the one on freedom of speech, in which a man stands up at what looks like a town meeting. He might be about twenty-nine. He is wearing a work jacket, so maybe he’s a high-school drop-out. There are better dressed people in the hall. And they are listening to him.

Photograph by Melissa Golden/Redux

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.